The final figures published by CIAJ for the Japanese telecom sector in the last full fiscal year (April 2007 through March 2008) show Wireless network equipment posted sales of 236.8 million yen, a positive growth of 11.3% over the previous year. However, mobile terminal equipment earned 1.662 trillion yen down 4.2% YoY, of which cellular phones accounted for 1.546 trillion yen or negative growth of 5.3% over the previous year. Full details Here.
Panasonic Mobile Communications and NTT DATA Corp. announced they have reached a basic agreement on a capital and business alliance on Panasonic Mobile & System Engineering (“PMSE”), a wholly owned subsidiary of Panasonic Mobile. NTT DATA will take over 60 percent of the shares issued by PMSE and establish the new, yet to be named, company in Yokohama by October 2008.
In a landmark announcement yesterday, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo expressed their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations. This initiative is supported by current shareholders and management of Symbian Limited, who have been actively involved in its development.
Nokia announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation. Sony Ericsson and Motorola today announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. From these contributions, the Foundation will provide a unified platform with common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.
A flood of press releases came out of Qualcomm in San Diego last week including the Adobe tie-up for Flash, a new widgets platform, we also found this Q&A with Paul Jacobs via Tech-on interesting. The company also announced the winners for their annual BREW developer awards and we’re somewhat shocked to see that not one company from Japan managed to bring home the hardware, as they have for the past four years running.
DoCoMo announced that the board of directors has met and proposed changes in executive positions for official approval at the shareholders and board of directors meetings scheduled to be held on June 20, 2008. Most notably the replacement of President and CEO Masao Nakamura who will hand over the helm after 4-years to Ryuji Yamada. Also noted as officially resigning, and widely reported, SVP Takeshi Natsuno. A quick trip down memory lane after the jump.
Qualcomm announced that it has successfully demonstrated the capability to support the MediaFLO and ISDB-T (1Seg) mobile TV standards on a multi-mode handset. Powered by their Universal Broadcast Modem — UBM — chipset, “the technology illustrates that MediaFLO technology can complement the free-to-air standard used in Japan and Brazil to enable a mix of free and paid mobile broadcast content and services to drive consumer adoption and revenue.” See our video interview with MediaFLO recorded here in 2006.
KDDI and Kyocera announced they are recalling 214,349 batteries used in the W42K model made by Kyocera handsets because they may overheat. The companies note they were aware of 13 cases reported where batteries overheated causing burn injuries burns to three people. According to the press release battery production was contracted to NEC Tokin Corp., 51 percent owned by NEC Corp., and made in China. Kyocera said it will suspend use of NEC Tokin’s products.
The official announcement from Mitsubishi Electric indicating they will exit the mobile handset business just hit the newswire. Noting fierce competition and downtrending market share they are the second Japanese ODM to terminate their manufacturing operations this fiscal year. According to their statement, the company estimates 2.1 million units sold over the year for approx. $1 billion and plans to “maintain and further strengthen the partnership with NTT DoCoMo through the communication related business”, essentially so-called ‘hard iron’ base station network segment.
Morpho, Inc., provider of image processing software solutions for mobile devices, has announced that it received an investment in the amount of 165 Million JPY (approx. $150 Million) from Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital arm of Nokia. The investment from Nokia Growth Partners, its first ever in a Japanese company, follows Morpho’s recent announcement that it had received an investment from DoCoMo. With these latest rounds of funding Morpho plans to grow its overseas operations to meet the increasing demands of customers worldwide.
Alcatel-Lucent and NEC announced the start of a broad collaboration to market advanced end-to-end communications solutions. Alcatel-Lucent and NEC have decided to form a joint venture that will focus on the development of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless broadband access solutions. Through this joint development effort, the two companies intend to accelerate the availability of next-generation wireless solutions.
